The pathway for light-induced superconductivity

Controlling materials with light is at the forefront of both experimental and theoretical efforts in Condense Matter. The grand goal is to use light as a magic wand, creating new material properties at will. The most ambitious of these explorations is the effort to photo-induce superconductivity far above Tc. In this talk, I will describe how a phonon coupling to an inter-band electron transition provides a potential paradigm shift in this field. I will show that such a coupling naturally provides attraction proportional to phono fluctuations, which can be enhanced upon driving. This enhancement can be resonantly amplified when the electronic gap and the phonon frequency are close in energy. Moreover, I will show how this model can lead to long-lived superconductivity and how it may explain experiments in pumped K3C60, where a long-lived SC-like signal appears for several ns. Finally, I will end the discussion by proposing 2D materials coupled to surface plasmons as an ideal platform for engineering new photo induced SC states.